There's a Name for It (Part Three)

Hobson-Jobsonism, lazy pronouns, burlesque metaphors, and garden-path sentences: you'll find definitions and examples of these and many more witty and wonderful language-related terms here in part three of There's a Name for It.

In our extensive Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you'll find a name for . . .

1. a figurative comparison that's exceptionally comic, grotesque, or exaggerated, as in Ford Maddox Ford's image of "a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard" to describe a "girl . . . dressed in cream-coloured muslin": burlesque metaphor


2. a verb--such as keep, promise, or seem--that can link with other verbs to form a chain or series: catenative verb


3. a face-to-face interaction in which one speaker talks at the same time as another speaker to show an interest in the conversation: cooperative overlap


4. two successive letters that represent a single sound or phoneme (such as ai in rain): digraph


5. a type of direct question that repeats part or all of something which someone else has just said ("What do I want?"): echo question


6. a construction in which part of a sentence is omitted rather than repeated ("Gus prefers coffee, and Mary, tea"): gapping


7. a sentence that's temporarily confusing because it leads the reader to a mistaken interpretation as the sentence is being processed (for example, "The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi"): garden-path sentence


8. the practice of using a particular trademark (such as Band-Aid) as a name for the product in general (in this case, any adhesive bandage): generification or genericide


9. the use of a verb phrase in the present tense to refer to an event that took place in the past ("So this guy walks into a bar . . ."): historical present


10. the alteration of a word in one language when used by speakers of another language (such as English dandelion--sometimes pronounced "dandy-line"--from Old French dentdelion, "the tooth of the lion"): Hobson-Jobsonism


11. a neurological phenomenon (usually associated with temporal lobe epilepsy) that's characterized by an uncontrollable urge to write: hypergraphia


12. a verb form characteristic of African-American Vernacular English that's used to indicate a habitual and repeatable action ("He be working every day"): invariant "be"


13. a pronoun that doesn't refer explicitly or precisely to an antecedent: lazy pronoun


14. discrimination based on a person's language or dialect: linguicism


15. a dispute about words and their meanings: logomachy


16. a verb (such as bore, frighten, please, or anger) that expresses a mental state or event: psych verb


17. quotation marks used around a word or phrase to suggest that the "expression" is somehow inappropriate or misleading: scare quotes


18. a sentence construction in the passive voice in which the subject is absent altogether rather than reduced to a prepositional phrase introduced by "by": short passive


19. slurred and compressed speech, such as Tsamatta? for "What's the matter?": Slurvian


20. a type of cliché or formulaic expression (such as "X is the new Y") that can be recast in different contexts: snowclone


21. a fragment of a word used in the formation of new words (such as -holic in shopaholic and chocoholic): splinter


22. the euphemistic practice of assigning a more impressive-sounding name to a job position, usually without providing additional responsibilities, resources, or benefits: title inflation

You'll find examples and explanations of these and over 1,200 other language-related words and phrases in our ever-expanding Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms.

More Words About Words:

• There's a Name for It: Twenty Weird, Witty, and Wonderful Language-Related Terms
• There's Another Name for It: More Witty and Wonderful Language-Related Terms